Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was a dreamer. Bradbury had a skill at putting his dreams onto paper, and into books. He dreams dreams of magic and transformation, good and evil, small-town America and the canals of Mars. His dreams are not only popular, but durable. His work consists of short stories, which are not hard to publish, and keep in the public eye. His stories have stayed in print for nearly three decades.

Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in a small town of Waukegan,

Illinois. His parents were Leonard Spaulding and Esther Moberg Bradbury. His mother, Esther Moberg loved films, she gave her son the middle name Douglas because of Douglas Fairbanks, and she passed her love of films to her son. "My mother took me to see everything....." Bradbury explains, "I'm a child of motion pictures." Prophetically, the first film he saw, at the age of three, was the horror classic "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", staring Lon Chanley. His teenage

Aunt Neva gave the boy his appreciation of fantasy, by reading him the Oz books, when he was six. When Bradbury was a child he was encouraged to read the classic,

Norse, Roman, and Greek Myths. When he was old enough to choose his own reading materials, he chose books by Edger Rice Burroughs and the comic book heroes

Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Prince Valiant. When Bradbury was in Waukegan he developed his interest in acting and Drama. After seeing a magician, known as

Blackstone, he became fascinated with magic also.

In 1932, his family moved to Tucson Arizona. With his talents he learned in Waukegan (amateur magician) he got a job at the local radio station. "I was on the radio every Saturday night reading comic strips to the kiddies and being paid in free tickets, to the local cinema, where I saw 'The Mummy', 'The Murders in the Wax Museum', 'Dracula', .....and 'King Kong'." His family only stayed in

Tuscan for a year, but Bradbury feels: "It was one of the greatest years of my life because I was acting and singing in operettas and writing, my first short stories." In 1934 his family moved to Los Angeles, where Bradbury has remained. He attended Los Angeles High School, where he wrote and took part in many dramatic productions. His literary ...

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...feild is. The demands of the commercial marketplace and the need to confine a popular writer and his within an easy recognizable image have resulted in Bradbury's being jammed uncomfortably into a box labeled "Science Fiction". No definition of science fiction exists that pleases everybody, and even if it did, to apply it casually to the work of Ray

Brabdbury would be inaccurate and unfair. H.G. Wells, whom many regard as a classical science fiction writer, had this to say about his own novels "They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream. They have to hold the reader to the end by art and illusion and not by proof and argument, and the moment he closes the cover the reflects he wakes up to their impossibility." Wells here is contrasting his stories with those of Jules Verne, wich he calls, 'anticipatory inventions." Viewed this way, virtually all of

Bradbury's stories are fantasies, with Wells's concept of the "good gripping dream" coming closest to describing their effect. Even today Ray Bradbury's place in literature is not clear.